Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, born on July 28, 1929, was the widow of President John F. Kennedy and of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. She died at age 64 in 1994 in New York.

Although Mrs. Onassis was one of the world's most famous women — an object of fascination to generations of Americans and the subject of countless articles and books that re-explored the myths and realities of the Kennedy years, the terrible images of the president's 1963 assassination in Dallas, and her made-for-tabloids marriage to the wealthy Mr. Onassis — she was a quintessentially private person, poised and glamorous, but shy and aloof.

They were qualities that spoke of her upbringing in the wealthy and fiercely independent Bouvier and Auchincloss families, of mansion life in East Hampton and Newport, commodious apartments in New York and Paris, of Miss Porter's finishing school and Vassar College and circles that valued a woman's skill with a verse-pen or a watercolor brush, at the reins of a chestnut mare or the center of a whirling charity cotillion.

She was only 23, working as an inquiring photographer for a Washington newspaper and taking in the capital night life of restaurants and parties, when she met John F. Kennedy, the young bachelor Congressman from Massachusetts, at a dinner party in 1952. She thought him quixotic after he told her he intended to become president.

But a year later, after Mr. Kennedy had won a seat in the Senate and was already being discussed as a presidential possibility, they were married at Newport, R.I., in the social event of 1953, a union of powerful and wealthy Roman Catholic families whose scions were handsome, charming, trendy and smart. It was a whiff of American royalty.

And after Mr. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, Jackie Kennedy, the vivacious young mother who showed little interest in the nuances of politics, busily transformed her new home into a place of elegance and culture. She set up a White House fine arts commission, hired a White House curator and redecorated the mansion with early 19th-century furnishings, museum quality paintings and objets d'art, creating a sumptuous celebration of Americana.

The images of Mrs. Kennedy that burned most deeply were those in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963: her lunge across the open limousine as the assassin's bullets struck, the Schiaparelli pink suit stained with her husband's blood, her gaunt stunned face in the blur of the speeding motorcade, and the anguish later at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Five years later, with images of her as the grieving widow faded but with Americans still curious about her life and conduct, Mrs. Kennedy, who had moved to New York to be near family and friends and had gotten into legal disputes with photographers and writers portraying her activities, shattered her almost saintly image by announcing plans to marry Mr. Onassis. It was a field day for the tabloids, a shock to members of her own family and a puzzlement to the public, given the Camelot-Kennedy mystique. The prospective bridegroom was much shorter, and more than 28 years older, a canny businessman and not even American.

While the couple was never divorced, the marriage was widely regarded as over long before Mr. Onassis died in 1975, leaving her a widow for the second time.

Mrs. Onassis began her career in publishing in 1975, when her friend Thomas Guinzburg, then the president of Viking Press, offered her a job as a consulting editor. In 1978, she took a new job as an associate editor at Doubleday under another old friend, John Sargent, and was installed at first in a small office with no windows.

At Doubleday, where she was eventually promoted to senior editor, Mrs. Onassis was known as a gracious and unassuming colleague who had to pitch her stories at editorial meetings, just as everyone else did. But she was very productive, editing 10 to 12 books a year on performing arts and other subjects. Her books included Bill Moyers's "Healing and the Mind"; Michael Jackson's "Moonwalk"; and Edvard Radzinsky's "The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II." Her love of Egypt inspired her, among other things, to bring the Cairo Trilogy, "Palace Walk," "Palace of Desire" and "Sugar Street" by Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize winner from Egypt, to Doubleday, where they were published in translation.

Mrs. Onassis was also known for her efforts to preserve historic New York buildings.

She had two children, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John F. Kennedy Jr.

August 11, 2014, Monday

In 1950, Jacqueline Bouvier began an extraordinary correspondence with an Irish priest in which she revealed her private thoughts as she dated, then married, then witnessed the assassination of the president of the United States.